North Korean laptop farms crippled by feds in Dallas

Federal investigators say they crippled a ring of North Korean state-sponsored cyber crooks stealing from American companies. The infiltrators used remote access from places like Russia, China, North Korea, but made it look like they were in Dallas and other U.S. cities. Fox 4's Sean Rabin now to explain. Sean. Yeah, this was a Texas-based national security operation to dismantle what the government says North Korea does to take money from the U.S., money that's used to fund ballistic missile and nuclear weapon programs. The government says it disrupted a network designed to steal American business secrets, American workers' identities and American workers' wages. It's called Operation Lone Star Roundup aimed at taking a network of laptop computers the government says being used by remote workers at U.S. companies who are actually North Koreans stealing from the U.S., North Korea funds its nuclear weapons program and ballistic missile system and other malign operations in part by deploying North Korean IT workforce in companies to infiltrate our American companies. Search warrants were executed in Operation Lone Star from September 21st through September 25th in coordination with FBI field offices in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Louisville, New Orleans, and Cleveland. We successfully executed Operation Lone Star Roundup, resulting in the seizure of more than 180 devices from approximately 40 locations across the state of Texas. In North Texas alone, we seized more than 100 laptops. Laptops issued to remote workers are the access points. For years, North Korea has operated an overseas network of IT workers who masquerade as legitimate IT contractors. Ian Marlow is CEO of FightTech Cybersecurity Consultants. Whether they're using false documents, they're using falsified accounts, multiple IP addresses, meaning all of these things mask their true identity, which are becoming more and more difficult to be able to verify. Once hired with help from people they pay inside the US, they get a company-issued laptop and then hook up many other laptops called Laptop Farms to it. and fraudulently steal through remote access and fake accounts that give the North Korean IT workers access from overseas to control them as though they were sitting right there in Texas or anywhere else inside of our country. But given that in almost all of these cases, these are contract positions through companies. It's also companies that are not necessarily doing the appropriate due diligence to ensure that the individual is in fact the individual that they expected to do the work. If it seems strange that companies would hire workers with little to no face-to-face interaction, the feds agree, amplifying their alert about the Korean IT worker threat to businesses, specifically here in Dallas. It's important to use E-Verify. It's important to make sure that you get a couple forms of identification. If you've never met this person, you're hiring them and you're giving them access to your information systems, that's a red flag. So the feds say indictments are coming, but again, they say they had to sound the alarm right now because of what they uncovered right here in North Texas. To give you an idea what we're talking about, they tell us that in 2024, nationwide, $800 million stolen from U.S. businesses through this Korean IT remote worker kind of scheme.